In his novel Haha... Cough Cough... I Miraculously Survived, Sudanese novelist Mustafa Khalid Mustafa portrays war as a complex human experience that cannot be grasped through a single voice or a linear narrative. From the outset, he chooses the language of multiplicity, allowing six characters to take turns narrating, as though each were offering a different angle on the same tragedy.
The novel, published earlier this year, won the Bait Al-Ghasham Dar Arab International Translation Award and belongs to a body of work in which form and content meet with unusual force. Its narrative techniques are woven into the meaning itself. Free association, diary writing, and multiple voices present the story as a reflection of the mental disorientation that descends in wartime.
From its title, the writer places us before a sharp paradox. The broken laugh, heavy cough, and survival feel closer to mockery than deliverance. The title suggests absurdity, perhaps even indifference, yet beneath it lies a deep existential tension. Who survives war? What does survival mean in a world falling apart? The title reveals its full meaning only at the end of the journey, when it emerges as the voice of a tormented character who sees survival as the continuation of an endless agony.
The novel opens with a nightmarish fantasy scene. “When the shell exploded in our neighbour’s head, she turned into a garden of flowers.” It is a shocking sentence, clearly rooted in the devices of magical realism, where violence meets beauty and death is recast in a bewildering poetic image. This fusion of ugliness and beauty, of reality and imagination, runs through much of the novel, as though it were the only language capable of saying what otherwise resists speech.
In the first chapter, we meet Rawi, a government employee who suddenly finds himself a writer. He tries to write a novel within the novel, an unfinished and unsettled text, yet one charged with the density of lived experience. The events unfold in one of Omdurman’s neighbourhoods, where the world becomes an open theatre of collapse: shells, bullets, daily fear, and primitive attempts at survival. The narrator recounts events while observing, with the eye of a meticulous witness, the transformations of place, people and things.
The novel succeeds in showing the transformations that overtake people by tracing the change that befalls the narrator’s younger sister. Before the war, she watched cartoons and animated series. After, she follows the news. In a sentence that condenses the philosophy of war, she tells her brother: “The bullet whose sound you hear is one you have survived; the bullet that hits you, you will never hear.” In those few words, a child ages several years.
In this chapter, too, the canary appears, one of the slain neighbour’s birds, as a symbolic presence that will accompany the novel to its end. The canary sings amid gunfire and becomes a witness. It vanishes and returns, as though it were memory itself, or perhaps the spirit that refuses to die entirely.
Chaotic intervals
The writer grants the reader no interval of stability. In a sudden moment, the first narrator dies merely because he opens a window. A passing death, without prelude, exposes the nature of war: no one is protected, no one is important enough to be spared. With this death, the narration moves to a new, female voice. In the second chapter, we follow the experience of fleeing Khartoum, within the chaos of a security breakdown, looting, violence, rape, and intimate betrayal.
The narrator in this chapter is a paralysed young woman who writes a long letter to the soldier she suspects will take over her room. "Whom are you fighting against?" she asks him. "And for what?" The questions seem simple, yet in the context of war they become an explicit indictment of all sides. Events reveal how war exposes hidden layers of violence within society itself. The guard who lived with the family for years may become a killer; a neighbour may become an informer; a relative may prove more dangerous than a stranger. "Wars strip away masks and lay souls bare," one says, in a sentence that sums up much of the novel.
